Few bands have explored music as long or as fiercely as Sonic Youth,
drawing influences from genres as disparate as hardcore punk, avant-garde
classical, free jazz and mainstream rock 'n' roll. Throughout their 19th studio
album, Sonic Nurse, and at an age when many of their peers have
retreated to playing past hits or nothing at all, they continue to
work complex and contradictory territory. Here flights of improvisational
fancy are bookended by tightly structured set pieces, otherworldly tunings
push the boundaries of the guitar/bass/drums, and evocative lyrics
drift in and out of focus against a seething mass of sound.

Like last year's Murray Street, widely hailed as a return
to form, Sonic Nurse is less confrontational than 1988's Daydream
Nation, building shimmering textures of interlocking guitars and
tucking the band's trademark dissonance into the cracks. It is only after
a few listens, for instance, that you hear the buzzsaw of feedback under
the laid-back "Dripping Dream," or the disturbing dissonances within "Dude
Ranch Nurse." Yet, according to guitarist Lee Ranaldo, there's no
softening at work here. "We've always loved both poles  the totally discordant and dissonant pole as well as the really beautiful pole," he said in a
recent phone interview. "I don't think we're afraid to put either one
in. It's a matter of what the songs call for."

Sonic Nurse is the second album recorded with Jim O'Rourke, whose
contribution Ranaldo described like this: "We imagine that these records
would sound pretty similar whether [Jim] was involved or not, in terms of
the songwriting. And yet, just having a fifth member, a fifth voice, adds
opinions and suggestions; it opens the music up a little bit more to some
new directions and new spaces."

He added that, paradoxically, incorporating
a third guitar had the effect of opening up some of the tracks and
increasing the space around the notes. "You'd think [the music] would get
denser, and sometimes it does, but also there's sort of freedom where you
know there's somebody else playing, so everybody's free to leave a little
bit more holes in their parts."

That space and extra player heighten the complexity of one of Sonic
Youth's quintessential sounds  those sections (for instance in "Stones"
and "Pattern Recognition") where everyone in the band is playing distinct
and totally different parts that somehow come together and make sense as a
whole. "We love to do those kind of interlocking parts," Ranaldo
commented. "It's something that [Sonic Youth vocalist/guitarist] Thurston [Moore] and I have done for years, and
it's a lot of fun having a third person around to do them with
us. Actually Thurston and I would do some of that kind of stuff with [bassist] Kim [Gordon]
when she was playing a lot more guitar  which she still is, but when we
weren't having a bass player. Now that we've got three guitars and a bass
on pretty much everything, we do even more of that sort of interlocking
stuff."

Ranaldo says that the band spends many hours in rehearsal working out those
individual but complementary parts. A song's structure will eventually
become locked in, but others remain, as he puts it, "open to continually
evolving interpretation.

"I think as we've progressed in our songwriting,
we've built more set structures into our songs, whereas in the early days
it was a little bit more improvisational throughout the pieces," he
explained. "But still there are improvisational sections, where you know
that you're starting at point A and ending at point B and everybody's
pretty much free to get there in whatever manner they choose."

But whether the band is building complex structures or shooting off into
improvisational free-play, their 20-plus years together shows up in the
nearly telepathic communication of musical ideas. "There's no doubt that
that's one of the advantages that we have as a band, that we have been
developing a language of playing together for a really long time," Ranaldo said. "We've definitely got our own vocabulary."

Sonic Youth have become nearly synonymous with experimentation, yet it's an
organic kind of experimentation that makes very little use of studio tools
like samples and effects. Instead, the band pushes the sounds of
traditional rock instruments  guitar, bass and drums  to extremes
through alternate tunings and keys and nearly symphonic use of
feedback. "That's pretty much the way we work," said Ranaldo, adding that
the band has used samples and studio manipulations in the past, but
that they are not an integral part of its sound. "We're a rock band. We
play guitars, bass and drums, and that's what we're happiest
doing, although we've done experiments in the past, like especially on the
Ciccone Youth, where we were working with the technology of the studio. But
in general, we like to create songs that are immediately reproduceable. We
create them as a band and then we go out and play them as a band."

The alternate tunings, he said, keep the band fresh by constantly forcing
them to rethink song structures and melodies. "We're constantly pulling
the rug out from under ourselves, moment by moment, by changing what
tunings we're going to work in," he explained. "It keeps us thinking with
the kind of mindset of people that have just come to learn their
instruments or that have just come to learn their songwriting craft. Which
is, I think, one of the reasons why we have songs that sound so different
on our records. As a matter of course, just that they are all mixed up
together in terms of the way we write them. We'll write three songs in one
kind of manner and then another one or two songs in a completely different
kind of approach."

The new album includes a wide range of songs, from the gentle drone of "I
Love You Golden Blue" to the laid-back cool of "Dripping Dream" to the
politically charged "Dude Ranch Nurse," and "Peace Attack." The
hardest-rocking, most punk-oriented song, however, is clearly "Kim Gordon
and Arthur Doyle Handcream," which was previously released as a split
single with Erase Errata on Narnack. (The single's title was "Mariah Carey
and Arthur Doyle Handcream," but Geffen insisted on a title change to
forestall lawsuits.) The song continues in the Sonic Youth tradition of
commenting on female pop icons  earlier songs have referenced Madonna,
Karen Carpenter and others  yet is oddly sympathetic. The fact that Kim
Gordon (clearly herself a female pop icon of another sort) is singing adds
a layer of contradiction to the biting lyrics, which Ranaldo explained
were written by the whole band.

"We were really interested in this whole scenario that went down around
Mariah around the time of her meltdown and the label kicking her off and
all that kind of stuff, after spending millions of dollars to acquire her
and then not having A&R support her records and letting her go because her
records only sold a couple million," he said. "In a way, the song is
looking at aspects of popular culture through the window of a single
person's image. It's about Mariah and her particular situation, but it's
also about looking at the whole culture of the big-time music industry and
how ridiculous it is."

The song also juxtaposes the two extremes of Sonic
Youth's eclectic mix of influences. "We could, on the one hand, be
interested in a popular figure as ubiquitous as Mariah and on the other
hand, we're obviously interested in people [like free-jazz saxophonist
Arthur Doyle] that are working on the fringes of the musical world. We
operate much more on the fringes and with people from that world as our
peers than we do in the world of the big-time music business. Our peers
are mostly people from the underground."

Another interesting cultural reference comes in the opening song, "Pattern
Recognition," inspired by cyber-punk novelist William Gibson's latest
book. The lyrics  including references to "cool-hunter" Cayce Pollard
and "footage-heads"  evoke the book's fascinating exploration of an
online culture that grows around a mysterious Internet-only film work,
released anonymously in short segments to an obsessive fanbase. "I've been
a fan of [Gibson's] right from the first book, from Neuromancer, and
I think Thurston has as well," Ranaldo said. "I don't know if Kim has read
the earlier books, but we were passing around Pattern Recognition
and Kim was interested in it, and took off from there, generating the
lyrics to that song. We're huge fans, and going back as far as
Sister we were referencing stuff from Neuromancer."

The album also has a number of political songs  "Peace Attack," "Dude
Ranch Nurse" in particular  and band members have been vocal in their
criticism of the war and the Bush administration. Yet Ranaldo says that,
really, Sonic Youth's main political statement has been through its
commitment to staying independent and supporting other bands that put art
over commerce. "I think of us as a political band more in the sense of we
stayed true to a certain kind of idea that was set out when we started," he
said. "We've consistently focused very definitely on the music and the
creation and not get bogged down in stuff like business or money or fame or
any of that kind of stuff. I think that a lot of other bands have taken
courage from that aspect of what we do, the fact that we've been a band as
long as we have and we haven't been co-opted or corrupted by the system.
Certainly, we're concerned in one degree or another about the current state
of affairs, but it's not our forte and we don't see ourselves as those
kinds of spokespeople."

In fact, Sonic Youth sit astride two worlds, making fiercely independent
albums and releasing them through Universal Music Group-owned Geffen Records,
delivering legendarily experimental live performances and being scheduled, until
its cancellation, on
Lollapalooza. Ranaldo says that the band has, for the most part, booked
headlining shows in the major markets covered by Lollapalooza (tour dates
are listed at the Sonic Youth site, http://www.sonicyouth.com/calendar/index.html)
and is a bit relieved not to be part of the festival tour. Ranaldo
says that he saw Lollapalooza as a chance to play bigger crowds and potentially
turn on
other bands' fans to their music. "But it was a tradeoff, because it
meant shorter sets and sets in a festival setting, rather than in a much
more intimate theater or rock club setting that we certainly do better in."

After a bit of scrambling, though, Sonic Youth are now booked at the kind of
theaters and clubs where they perform best, and able to play the longer sets
that incorporate both old and new songs. And, as in the past, the band
will be bringing along an exciting group of underground bands to open the shows,
including Wolf Eyes, White Magic, XBXRX, Hair Police, Les George Leningrad and
Jackie O
Motherfucker. "We're back into our own waters, bringing along our peers and
friends and people we respect to play  and some people that we want to
check out," Ranaldo said. "So I think it's going to be a really fun summer on
all those levels."  Jennifer Kelly [Monday, July 12, 2004]